.png)
The Heart Behind GNO
We’re Kelly and Haley Matthews, the mother-daughter team behind GNO Events.
What started as a shared love for small business and bringing women together has grown into a community centered around connection, support, and having a whole lot of fun along the way.
Through our Girls Night Out pop-ups, networking events, and GNO Socials, we create spaces for women to shop, connect, build relationships, support local businesses, and simply enjoy being together.
At the heart of it all, GNO is about women showing up for women, and we’re so proud of the community that continues to show up right alongside us. 💕
Our Story
Our story really starts in 2020, when we launched The Imprint Duo, our hand-stamped jewelry and accessories business.
What started as a small online shop quickly turned into traveling to markets, festivals, and pop-ups up and down the East Coast. We spent countless weekends setting up booths, meeting other small business owners, and learning the vendor world from the inside out.
After moving to Florida permanently in 2021, we continued doing events throughout Central Florida. We loved being part of the small business community, but the more events we attended, the more we found ourselves talking about what we wished existed.
We wanted something that felt like more than a traditional vendor market. An event women would make plans to come to with their friends, where shopping small was part of the experience, but so were the music, drinks, pictures, and just having a fun night out. And we wanted women-owned businesses to have a place where they could get in front of new customers while being part of something that felt exciting and different.
Eventually, we stopped talking about it and decided to try it ourselves.
In September 2023, we hosted our very first Girls Night Out at the Ocala Downtown Market. We truly had no idea what to expect, but the response from both vendors and the community showed us pretty quickly that we weren’t the only ones looking for something like this.
So we kept going.
One Girls Night Out turned into another, then another. We added networking events, created smaller GNO Socials, and continued finding new ways to bring women and local businesses together.
For a while, we ran The Imprint Duo and GNO side by side, but over time it became pretty clear where our hearts were. In 2026, we officially closed that chapter so we could give GNO the time, energy, and attention we knew it deserved.
Three years after that very first event, GNO has become so much more than the idea we had while standing behind our own vendor booth. And somehow, we still get to do what we loved most about the small business world from the beginning: meet incredible women, support local businesses, and create something people genuinely want to be a part of.
And we’re just getting started. 💕